Some of your remarks today show that you think the
Politbureau decision on the professors to be a
mistake.[1]

I’m afraid there is here some misunderstanding. I’m
afraid you have net interpreted the decision precisely.

I quite allow that Kalinnikov (that’s his name, isn’t
it?) is a reactionary. There are also, unquestionably,
malicious
Cadets[2] among them. But they should be exposed
in a different way. And exposed they should be on concrete
occasions. Give such an assignment to Kozmin (but he is
not too clever: watch your step with him): come up with
an exposure over a precise fact, act or statement. Then we
can put him in jail for a month, or a year. That will be a
lesson to him.

The same, if class enemies have slandered Ignatov (? that’s
his name, isn’t it? I do not know him).

We must prepare the material, verify it, expose the
culprits and condemn them in the full view of all, and
impose exemplary punishment.

The military specialist is caught out on treason. But
the military specialists have all been recruited, and are
working. Lunacharsky and Pokrovsky don’t know how to
“catch out” their own specialists and, being dissatisfied
with themselves, are taking it out of everybody else.

That is Pokrovsky’s mistake. In fact, you and I may
not have all that many differences.

The worst thing about the People’s Commissariat for
Education is the lack of system, of self-control. Their
communist cells are also shockingly “lax”.

The people over at the P.C.E. have still to learn how
to work out methods of “catching out” their specialists and
punishing them, and of catching out and training the
communist cells.

Notes

[2]Cadets—Russian abbreviation for the Constitutional-Democratic
Party, a party of the big bourgeoisie, which existed in Russia
from 1905; in tins case the word is used as a synonym for diehard
counter-revolutionaries.